


Sticks and Stones

by Ember_Keelty



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen, background Hawke/Anders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 17:09:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15369309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ember_Keelty/pseuds/Ember_Keelty
Summary: The Templars can't touch the Champion of Kirkwall. They take out their frustration by making sure she knows all about what they do to the mages theycantouch.





	Sticks and Stones

Ser Jerrad was beginning to think that all anyone ever did in Viscount's Keep was stand and wait. The visitors stood and waited for an audience with Seneschal Bran. Seneschal Bran stood and waited for the visitors to tire themselves out complaining about problems he had no way of solving. Jerrad and his fellow holy knights stood waiting for something to happen that might justify how many Templars were set on guard in this politically obsolete waste of Hightown real estate — but nothing ever did.

"Never thought this job would kill me of _boredom_ ," he muttered to himself.

"Don't be like that," said the Templar posted on the other side of the wide staircase, casually projecting his voice past an impatient noblewoman shifting her weight back and forth on the steps between them. "A boring assignment is a blessed assignment, if you ask me. Better than dealing with abominations, anyway."

"Maybe so," Jerrad conceded, "But all the same, it's a bit of a letdown. Dealing with abominations is what I signed up for, you know?"

The noblewoman lifted her head suddenly. Her eyes were blue as lyrium, and the stare she leveled at Jerrad packed at least as much of a kick. She wasn't a noblewoman at all, he realized. She was the apostate Champion playing at being noble so she could go on living the high life in her dead family's estate.

Maybe he could make his own entertainment.

"I mean," Jerrad continued, carefully avoiding eye contact with the apostate as he spoke loudly to his colleague standing behind her, "you could argue that it's safer here, but it's safe enough back in the Gallows so long as the ones you're working with are restrained, yeah?"

"Huh!" The other knight snorted in a way that made Jerrad suspect he was trying not to snicker. "True enough!"

"See, you get what I'm saying! It can still be a bit hurry-up-and-wait, of course. Lock one in the iron box, and all you've got to do is stand around until she decides whether she's going to quiet down and behave or tear herself to pieces on the spikes." Jerrad risked a glance at the apostate. She'd turned away from him to stare at the carpet on the landing straight ahead of her. "More stimulating than standing around here, though. Always some interesting sounds, for one thing."

"If it's exercise you want, you could flog 'em instead," his comrade suggested.

"It's so easy to go overboard with that, though," Jerrad lamented. "And when you do, it's all your fault. I had a mage die on the post a couple months back. She was a real pretty one, too. That might have been the problem: you see all that lovely bare skin on display, shuddering at every blow and getting all slick with blood and sweat, and you don't want to stop until you've wrung her out. But then there's nothing left to brand. What a waste!"

The apostate went right on pretending to ignore the conversation being volleyed about over her head, just like she kept pretending to be a lady and not a witch. Just like she kept pretending she was destined to die peacefully in a feather bed, not bloodied and chained up in the dark where she belonged.

Eventually, the queue moved forward enough that she was likely out of earshot, and Ser Jerrad went back to being bored.

—

"What are you going to do when the Right of Annulment comes in?" Ser Mettin asked Agatha, apropos of nothing, while they patroled the Lowtown market one evening.

"Follow orders and pray for the best," Ser Agatha answered curtly. "What else is there to do?"

"Me, I hope I get the apprentices," Ser Mettin said the moment Agatha finished speaking, as though listening to her thoughts before offering his own had been only the barest formality. "The middle ones, for preference: old enough to know about demons, too young to know much of anything else."

"So you want the easy assigment?" Why was he talking about this? It could have been a quiet confession of fear, except that it wasn't quiet at all. If anything, he sounded smug. "Are you bragging about being a coward?"

"Oh, I'm not saying I'd shy away from the riskier work! I just think it would be fun, that's all. If the assignment is easy, you can make your own challenge. Get _creative_."

The only response Agatha had for that was a blank stare. Ser Mettin held her eyes and pointedly tilted his head. When Agatha looked in the direction of his gesture, she saw Marian Hawke walking just a few paces ahead of them.

So this was about that stupid game Ser Jerrad claimed to have started. Agatha highly doubted that he'd been the first Templar to come up with the idea of trying to provoke the Champion into acting out in public, but he had been the one to suggest making a pool to reward whoever succeeded. Agatha had never bothered paying the ante herself, but she was bitterly unsurprised that Mettin had.

"This is beneath our dignity," she told him.

"You could do sword-testing!" Mettin continued, undaunted. "Bind their hands, line them up, see how many heads you can take in a single stroke! They'd be just about the perfect height for it!"

"Well, it's beneath _my_ dignity, anyway," Ser Agatha ammended.

Hawke made a sharp turn into an alley that led to one of the lifts down to Darktown. Mettin swerved to follow her, and nearly vanished into the shadows before he realized that Agatha wasn't with him. "What are you hanging back there for?" he demanded.

"What are _you_ running off from our patrol for?" she countered.

"I think I heard a scream," Mettin lied brazenly. "Did you hear a scream? It came from that way. Could be demons! We should go take a look."

"I didn't hear anything," Agatha said, "so _I_ will keep to the assigned route. If you want to go chasing down screams from dark alleys, you can do it alone."

As she turned on her heel and continued through the market, there was a moment when she thought he might be stupid enough to do just that. Soon, though, she heard him fall back into step beside her, grumbling about her being a killjoy.

Less than a week later, Ser Mettin turned up dead in the street — not, as Ser Agatha had expected, in some undercity gutter, but right out in the middle of one of the less squalid Lowtown neighborhoods. None of the residents of that neighborhood would admit to having seen anything, and Agatha couldn't blame them. In her opinion, if any of the people of Kirkwall had even an ounce of faith left in the Templar Order, it was due to the grace of the Maker and not to the merit of His supposed knights.

Maybe once the Gallows had been cleaned out, Agatha thought, she could get reassigned to a Circle where the other Templars weren't nearly as crazy as the mages. If that were the case, then the Annulment could not come soon enough.

—

The Champion strode into Templar Hall like she owned the place. Her pet sewer rat followed along, adding insult to injury. All Ser Brendon or anyone else could do was watch and bide time. Maybe the Knight-Commander had summoned her again, but if so, Brendon hadn't heard anything about it. More likely, she was here to conspire with Orsino. Ser Brendon couldn't fathom why it was allowed — but then, he still couldn't fathom why a mage had been named Champion in the first place. It just seemed to be asking for trouble.

Some of the other Templars started talking loudly to themselves as she passed, but by this point, it was more habit than anything. For all her supposed temper, the Champion had yet to rise to any of the wide variety of bait they had tossed at her over the years, and they had no reason to think that was about to change. Nothing any Templar said had the power to make her do more than sneer or snarl.

 _Nothing any Templar said..._ When Brendon thought of it like that, an exciting new idea occurred to him. The game had gotten stale, but maybe there was a way to spice it up.

He ducked out past the portcullis to the Gallows' market square, found what he was looking for in a matter of moments, and grabbed her by the wrist to bring back with him.

"I should not leave my wares unattended," Helena said as she followed him. "They will likely be stolen."

"This won't take long," Brendon told her.

"I am aware of that," said Helena. From anyone else, Brendon would think that was an insult, but the Tranquil were not known for their sass. "However, neither does a theft of opportunity."

"Don't worry about it," Brendon said without thinking, then chuckled at his own mistake. "As if you could!"

"I cannot," Helena confirmed. "I would be less distracted, though, if you would promise to pay for any merchandise that is missing when we return. My physical capabilities are still diminished from the last time I received a beating. It is troublesome, and I would prefer that the problem not be compounded."

Brendon did not bother responding, because he had finally caught up to the apostates. "Hey, Helena!" he said at just below the volume of a shout. "Who's got the biggest cock you've ever seen?"

Some Templars within earshot burst out in shocked laughter.

"Do you mean in terms of length, or of girth?" Helena asked.

"Wait, what?" That was not the response he had been expecting after the more private conversation they'd had on the topic a few days ago.

One of the nearby Templars went from laughing to wheezing. The Champion laid a hand on her healer's shoulder, but did not stop walking or even glance behind her to see who was tailing them.

"You, Ser Brendon, have the largest around," Helena continued serenely, "but Ser Declan has the longest."

The wheezing Templar doubled over in hysterics. Another knight standing next to him had to haul him upright before he lost his balance and toppled to the ground.

The Champion froze up so suddenly that Brendon nearly ran into her back, and he found himself thinking that maybe, just maybe, if this actually won him the pot, it would be worth the humiliation.

The healer gently took the Champion's hand from his shoulder and hooked their arms together, pulling her close. He brushed aside a lock of hair from her ear and leaned in to whisper something. It could only have been a word or two, but somehow that was enough to make her visibly relax. Then he pressed a kiss to the top of her head — shamelessly, brazenly, right out in the middle of the Gallows — and the two of them continued on their way.

Word spread quickly through the Templar barracks, and Ser Declan came to be known as Big Dec. Meanwhile, Ser Brendon began accumulating decidedly less flattering nicknames. Even if he'd gotten the money, he decided, it would not have been worth it.

That did not matter for long, though, because a few days later, everyone died.

—

"Why are we doing this now?" Ser Jerrad griped. "Why not when they're all asleep in their cells and not suspecting anything?"

The mages had come together to barricade themselves within the prison. The first wave of Templars stood on the steps of the Gallows, apprehensively waiting for the order to attack.

"Because the Knight-Commander is insane," Ser Agatha answered primly. "I thought that much was obvious."

"We shouldn't have to die for that!" Ser Brendon moaned. "Why are we following her orders if we all know she's insane? It shouldn't be like this. This is going to be a bloodbath."

"Everyone knows what _you_ signed up for," Ser Agatha said, "but _some_ of us actually do believe that the Order has a duty worth fulfilling, even if our superiors occasionally lose sight of it."

"And some of us just aren't small-dicked cowards," Ser Jerrad added.

"Very funny," said Ser Brendon. "Don't you think you could lay off that for two seconds, in light of the fact that we're all about to die?"

"I have no intention of dying," said Ser Agatha, "but with an attitude like yours, you'll deserve it if you do." Ser Jerrad laughed in agreement, and Ser Agatha turned to him to snap, "That goes for both of you!"

The attack order came. The Templars smashed their way through the portcullis and flooded into the Gallows, all bickering forgotten.

The mages greeted them with a barrage of fire and lightning and a shifting maze of ice and stone hurdles. The Templars cast cleanses ahead of and around themselves, but not all of them were quick enough. Some tripped on the obstacles, others fell stunned by the lightning. As Ser Brendon lifted a hand to blast a ridge of frost out of his path, a glob of flame fell upon his outstretched arm, melting his gauntlet to his skin. His hand seized, useless with agony, and his knees buckled, and he screamed himself breathless as the Templars who could still move charged past and the storm grew thick around him.

Those who made it through the maelstrom clashed against the front line of defenders. The mages had recruited a handful of swordsmen to their cause— the Captain of the Guard and her husband, a Warden, a few of the Champion's Hightown neighbors — but not nearly enough to match the Templars' numbers. Ser Jerrad let the other knights cross swords with them, and once they were all otherwise engaged, he slipped through a hole in the line and charged, blade held before him, at the first mage he laid eyes upon. Her attention was elsewhere. She did not see him coming.

His sword stuck in the air mid-swing. The green, vine-like tendril of magic that had caught it was so thin that Ser Jerrad failed to see it before a dozen other tendrils sprung up from the ground to ensnare him. Pulling tight, they sliced through his armor like wire through soft meat and lacerated the flesh beneath. Ser Jerrad struggled to break free, but his twisting about beneath the vines only served to create sawing motions that helped them dig in deeper. His blood welled up in pools, then rose from his skin in a thick mist that engorged the vines wherever it touched them.  The elven mage did not even look at him as she drained him dry, but remained focused on the battle before her, taking the power she drew from his spilling life and hurling it at the advancing Templar wave as balls of fire and clouds of noxious haze.

Ser Agatha weathered the storm. She cut her way through the front line of defense. She saw the Champion standing out in the open, weaving her hands through the air to pull lightning from the ceiling and ice from the floor. She met the Champion's eyes with her own, and met the spell the Champion fired off at her with a cleanse that not only nullified the attack but surged forward to obliterate the Champion's conjured-stone armor. Then they were within melee range. Ser Agatha brought her sword down, and the Champion brought up her staff to catch it.

"You win," the Champion snarled, which Agatha thought should obviously have been true. Her sword should have cut through the staff like it would have done to a twig — like it would have done to any Circle-issued staff — and struck the Champion's head from her shoulders. It should have, but it hadn't.

"What do you me—?" Ser Agatha started to ask, but was cut off by a gasp as a dagger slipped through a gap in her armor to puncture her chest.

"You win," Hawke repeated. "I am truly and thoroughly provoked. You're all winners, every last one of you."


End file.
